AN OLD COLUMN OF MINE THAT I RUN EVERY WORLD AIDS DAY. IT WAS ONE OF MY FIRST AND WAS PICKED UP WORLD WIDE. I'D LIKE TO SHARE IT WITH YOU AGAIN, ON THIS WORLD AIDS DAY, 2014.

Time out for: Gay Cancer, GRIDS, AIDS and HIV

My first gay friend to die of AIDS

jimmy palmieri | December 01, 2005

More than twenty three years ago, I lost my first gay friend, to what was being called a gay cancer, or grids (gay related immuno-deficiency). His name was Marty, and I met him at a mall in Northern New Jersey. I was around sixteen and flipping burgers in a restaurant there, and he was hawking shirts at some disco clothing store. I was very brazen and went right up to him, with my green and blue colored hair and asked him if he was gay. He laughed with his pink colored hair (yes these colors were the rage as Blondie ruled the airwaves) and said “but of course I am“ , in a very proper Bette Davis mime.

We became instant friends and he took me everywhere with him, as he was a few years older than me. We did the clubs, bars, and gay jaunts. We hung out, smoking cigarettes and “acting cool “ on Christopher Street, in New Yorks notoriously gay West Village. And we watched old Hollywood movies dreaming of what we would do “when we grew up”.

Several years passed, and while we remained friends, we were not as close, as our lives seemed to happen so fast. It was a very snowy Christmas Eve and I got a call from him. He was crying his eyes out, and as I watched the most beautiful snowstorm I had ever seen falling outside my bedroom window, Marty explained to me that he had just been kicked out of his house. His mother had found his Christmas present for his boyfriend and she flipped. She and his dad made him leave with just the clothes on his back. He went to his boyfriends in New York, and there he remained. He had to quit fashion school as he now needed a way to pay half of the rent, and his boyfriend was losing patience since finding a job seemed so difficult a task at the time.

Sadly, Marty did what so many do. He started hustling and doing what we now refer to as “survival sex”. He worked the piers by the river in New York. Of course he never had safe sex, as we knew nothing about HIV back then. He did this for a while, and somehow managed to even get through fashion school. I was off to college, and we kept in touch, here and there.

While I was at college, we started to hear stories of this gay cancer or gay disease that was killing people somewhere in New York. I honestly didn’t believe it, and thought it was anti-gay government propaganda. We heard of how lesions would cover your body, and your entire immune system would close down, leaving you to die in the most treacherous of ways. It all sounded so dramatic, and we were dismissing it as just urban legend, until it appeared in the New York Times. Unbelievably this was true. This horror of horrors was actually happening. No one knew how it was spread, or what to treat it with. All we knew was that it wasted your body away to skin and bones and covered you with these hideous spots (kaposis sarcoma). People who actually had it looked like the walking dead.

I ran into Marty, a few years into this strange epidemic, at a grocery store of all places, but something was very wrong. He was drawn, and thin. He was always thin, but this time he looked painfully thin. He looked sad, almost hollow in the eyes. But he hugged me and couldn’t wait to show me his new Louis Vuitton wallet. I told him it was as fake as his hair color, and we laughed our asses off. That was a Friday and we made plans to have dinner the next Wednesday and catch up.

That dinner never happened, as Marty died that Tuesday from PCP, a parasitic pneumonia that was killing many people that had what was now being called AIDS or HIV. I got a call from a common friend and was told they had a very difficult time finding a funeral parlor that would do the services. Back then, people were even afraid to visit funeral parlors that would have services for victims of this dreaded illness. They found one in New Jersey, and I drove there, very afraid, as I was sure so many of our crowd would look the same. Some did, some didn’t. What I noticed was that all of our gay crowd were in the back of the funeral home, and no one had gone to his casket. I asked why, and was told the family wanted all the gay people to remain in the back of the room, so he could have a dignified “goodbye”. This his very same family that threw him out on a snowy Christmas Eve years before.

I believe my activism began that night. I refused to remain in the back, and went up to his casket and said “goodbye my friend, it was a blast!”. Everyone followed, and we had a good cry and a great laugh at the horrified look on his family’s face, as a few drag queens sashayed up to the coffin, and bawled their lashes off.

I learned that night, never to be second best, and never to be ashamed of who I was. Marty was my friend. He was funny, dangerous, cute, and bawdy. He made me laugh, showed me things I had never seen before, and helped me feel “cool“. I learned from him, but also taught him as well. It was at his funeral, that I became empowered. I promised myself I was never going to hide in the back of a room, because of someone else’s opinion of me. And I also promised myself, never to forget Marty, or my more than twenty friends that would eventually succumb to AIDS in the ensuing years.

World AIDS Day, although many times sad, also brings back happy, silly times for me. Times that were free from HIV. Times that we didn’t have to be afraid of sex, and what could happen. And times when I had Marty around to help me feel “cool”.

jimmy palmieri – is a gay rights activist, who has been appointed to the Lesbian and Gay Advisory Board, and serves as a Human Services Commissioner currently for the city of West Hollywood. He has a double award winning lgbtq television show in West Hollywood called Time Out as well as as an enormously successful radio show called Donkey Punch on La Talk Radio.  . He has also written for The Canyon News, Wehonews.com and The West Hollywood Journal as well as Wehoville.com.. His byline is Nuff Said. Time Out. – Issued by Gay Link Content